Next year - repeat?

Do you think Samsonov ready to step in to the NHL?

Only way I do that CAR deal is if Skinner agrees to an extension. Not giving up 8 years of awesome Bura and a great goalie for 1 year of Skinner.

Agreed. Skinner has a ton of goals under his belt and has been the main guy to get them for his team, and that is valuable, but Burakovsky got 17 at even strength two years ago, when he played pretty much the whole year on Kuznetsov's line.

Could possibly trade Wilson for a 1st, and move Burakovsky up to the top line to get as many goals as Skinner next year, but end up with an RFA likely to stick around.



Samsonov said he's going to start in Hershey and come up soon. The other guys in Hershey have lower cap hits than him, so might as well put him up on a CF-AGM to make sure there's space if he's ready. Should be an exciting battle in training camp, with Vanecek and Copley.

And from what I see he won't extend his contract unless he likes to sacrifice some puck touches for the team and Ovechkin.

So the thing about a 23 year old defenseman who scored 12 points in his rookie year after scoring 60 pts in 58 games in his last year in juniors, and doing okay in the AHL, is that by the time he's 27, you expect him to get a whole lot more than 15 points.

That Bowey trade looks like a big overpayment to dump Orpik's contract. Bowey will be as good as Jensen the next year, and then keep improving for the next four years or more, while Jensen has one year until he's UFA.

You've got 2.8M in cap space and Jonsson-Fjallby and Gerisch can both be sent to the AHL without risking waivers. Of course, I'd sign DSP, but if you're not, you can trade Orpik for a worse or older player with a cap hit up to 3.5M and sign Bowey at a 1M cap hit for a couple years. Or you can just buy Orpik out for a 2.5M cap hit, sign DSP and Bowey for 1M each, and bring Gersich back up as soon as there's cap space.

Smith-Pelly is one of four Caps tied for fifth on the team in even strength playoff goals so far, at two, with Wilson, Beagle, and Connolly. He tends to play in a shutdown role on this team and still finds ways to contrubute on offense. He's not as important to the team's depth chart as Bowey, but he's 25 and has 11 career NHL playoff points. Connolly is 25 and has 4. Boyd and Walker are 24 and 23, and have 0. He wasn't as good as I thought he'd be in a brief top line opportunity, but he wasn't as bad as some people said he'd be either.